Awareness of Hong Kong Sign Language and Manually Coded Chinese by Deaf Students Learning in a Sign Bilingual and Co-Enrollment Setting
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Awareness of Hong Kong Sign Language and Manually Coded Chinese by Deaf Students Learning in a Sign Bilingual and Co-enrollment Setting University Press Scholarship Online Oxford Scholarship Online Educating Deaf Learners: Creating a Global Evidence Base Harry Knoors and Marc Marschark Print publication date: 2015 Print ISBN-13: 9780190215194 Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2015 DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215194.001.0001 Awareness of Hong Kong Sign Language and Manually Coded Chinese by Deaf Students Learning in a Sign Bilingual and Co-enrollment Setting A Hong Kong Case Study Gladys Tang Chris Kun-Man Yiu Scholastica Lam DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190215194.003.0006 Abstract and Keywords This chapter reports on a study that explored whether severely and profoundly deaf students studying in a sign bilingual and co-enrollment environment were aware of the existence of two forms of signing— Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) and manually coded Chinese (MCC) —in the learning environment, and how they differentiated one form of signing from the other. To investigate this issue, we recruited 18 severe to profoundly deaf students studying in this environment to participate in a language differentiation task, a questionnaire survey, and a focus group discussion. Results showed that there was growing language awareness between HKSL and MCC among the students, and their language differentiation ability was correlated with HKSL but not Cantonese or written Chinese proficiency. Data from the other two Page 1 of 43 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Chinese University of Hong Kong; date: 14 December 2017 Awareness of Hong Kong Sign Language and Manually Coded Chinese by Deaf Students Learning in a Sign Bilingual and Co-enrollment Setting tasks found interesting preferences for communication modes in class, subject to the hearing status of the teachers as well as pedagogical motivations. Keywords: sign bilingualism, co-enrollment, language awareness, deaf students, deaf teacher Page 2 of 43 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Chinese University of Hong Kong; date: 14 December 2017 Awareness of Hong Kong Sign Language and Manually Coded Chinese by Deaf Students Learning in a Sign Bilingual and Co-enrollment Setting Introduction As a consequence of the promotion of inclusive deaf education in recent years, signed language support is no longer confined to deaf schools in many countries and may be brought into mainstream settings attended by deaf students. It is usually rendered by Deaf teachers/ paraprofessionals, hearing itinerant teachers for the deaf, or sign interpreters (Humphries & Allen, 2008; McKee, 2005). To some extent, such signed language support indirectly promotes bimodal bilingualism of these deaf students although it is usually not the primary goal but deaf students’ “rights to access to information.” The inertia of promoting bimodal bilingualism for deaf students seems to stand against the accumulative research findings of bilingualism over the past decades. In spoken languages, results suggest a cognitive advantage rather than disadvantage. Constant code switching between languages, for instance, reflects the bilingual language user’s linguistic sophistication rather than confusion. It may also lead to a heightened metalinguistic awareness of the similarities and differences between two linguistic systems (Bialystok, 2001; Bialystok & Barac, 2012; Bialystok, Peets, & Moreno, 2014; Grosjean, & Li, 2013). On the sign bilingual front, research on bimodal bilingualism features code blending to be more prominent than code switching. The facility of using both the oral and manual articulators simultaneously is one reason; another more important reason is the possibility of accessing (p.118) two grammatical systems simultaneously during linguistic processing (Donati & Branchini, 2013; Emmorey, Borinstein, & Thompson, 2005; Fung & Tang, submitted; Lillo-Martin, Quadros, Koulidobrova, & Chen Pichler, 2010; van den Bogaerde & Baker, 2005). Co-activation of two lexicons is also observed among bimodal bilinguals, adults and children alike (Ormel & Giezen, 2014). Taken as a whole, this body of research underscores the possibility of cross- linguistic or cross-modal transfer of knowledge of two linguistic systems in bimodal bilinguals, both in terms of language acquisition and language processing. In recent years, deaf school education where the philosophy of sign bilingualism found its origin in the early 80s is being replaced gradually by inclusive education. However, as said, the adoption of natural signed language in regular school settings is not automatic. The increasing popularity of cochlear implantation seems to make signed language look superfluous or an unfounded threat to deaf students’ oral language development when they are educated in regular school settings. Even for research on the effectiveness of signed language on supporting deaf students’ education, there are constant debates about the choice between natural signed language or manually coded spoken language Page 3 of 43 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Chinese University of Hong Kong; date: 14 December 2017 Awareness of Hong Kong Sign Language and Manually Coded Chinese by Deaf Students Learning in a Sign Bilingual and Co-enrollment Setting (Schiavetti, Whitehead, & Metz, 2004). In fact, it is common to find different forms of signing in sign bilingual classrooms, namely natural signed languages and other codes of communication such as manually coded spoken language (i.e., sign-supported speech), cued speech, fingerspelling, and the like. Learning under such conditions, deaf students need to glean classroom contents as well as linguistic input from the naturalistic and artificial forms of signing in the learning environment. This raises an empirical question of whether they are conscious of the distinctions between the variety of signing around them. Apparently, what influences the decision to adopt either natural signed language or manually coded spoken language in teaching and learning can be boiled down to factors like the ideology of deaf education, educational settings, signing skills of the teachers of the deaf, as well as the educators’ attitudes toward the utility of adopting natural signed language or manually coded spoken language as a medium of instruction, over and above their concern over whether these forms of signing support deaf students’ academic attainment or literacy development. All these considerations aside, whether deaf students themselves mark a distinction and how they perceive the utility of the two forms of signing are left unexplored. In this chapter, we report on a study that investigated the extent to which severely and profoundly deaf students educated in a sign bilingual and co-enrollment environment in Hong Kong developed an awareness that there are two different forms of signing—Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) and manually coded Chinese (MCC)—in their learning environment. We examined the strategies these deaf students (p.119) adopted to mark a characteristic distinction between the two forms of signing which intriguingly occur in the same visual modality. We also attempted to explore how they perceived the utilities of these signing varieties in supporting teaching and learning. In this chapter, MCC is defined as a form of artificial signing that is usually adopted to accompany speech; hence, it reflects, either in full or in part, the grammar of either Cantonese or written Chinese. In the Hong Kong context, written Chinese is pronounced via a Cantonese sound system. Although deaf students educated in such an environment are constantly exposed to input from HKSL, MCC, and Cantonese,1 the language contact situation plus the possibility of cross-modal, cross-linguistic transfer also implies that there may be occasions for the use of MCC. Are deaf students cognizant of the existence of the two different forms of signing in their sign bilingual learning environment? We argue that acquiring such awareness is crucial because it enables us to examine Page 4 of 43 PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy). Subscriber: Chinese University of Hong Kong; date: 14 December 2017 Awareness of Hong Kong Sign Language and Manually Coded Chinese by Deaf Students Learning in a Sign